How Data Proliferation Can Provide a Competitive Advantage to Channel Partners (Part Three)

This is the third in Andrea’s three part series on the competitive advantages of data proliferation. Parts One and Two are posted on Andrea’s LinkedIn page. In Part One Andrea discusses how channel partners are in a unique position to capitalize on data insights. Part Two looks at how Tech Data is enabling channel partners to succeed with analytics and IoT.

In this blog post, I’ll show how vertical expertise provides a competitive advantage for success around the largest growth opportunity in our industry.

Although, analytics and IoT solutions are an aggregate of many of the technologies we are familiar with and have been selling for years (i.e., networking, software and storage), what drives consumption is the vertical-led use cases.

End-customers want to work with partners that understand their business and can prescribe outcome-driven solutions, not just technology. They want to work with partners that can apply technology to create business outcomes that make improvements around becoming more efficient, transforming business models to help generate more revenue and increasing client engagement, among others.

To help customers understand how technology solutions can solve their business problems, a solid understanding of their industry is necessary. Partners that have the vertical industry expertise to do this are experiencing the most growth.

Although there are many verticals driving growth in IoT and analytics, we recommend that partners specialize and focus on one or two key verticals as determined by their customer base. Within each of these verticals, we leverage the Solution Factory methodology to aggregate and vet multi-vendor repeatable solutions to help lower the barrier of entry and accelerate time to market. Tech Data helps alleviate the heavy lift and complexity typically associated with analytics and IoT through this solution readiness methodology, as well as through our Practice Builder™ proven methodology for building and advancing your next-generation practices.

In my first article of this series, I highlighted the channel’s hesitation toward analytics and IoT. Tech Data responded by empowering our partners to turn their reluctance into a fervor. Even if you are not a vertical expert now, leverage us to win in this space and we can help put you on the path to becoming one sooner than expected.

Watch for more of our Tech Data consultants sharing key use cases and strategies for leveraging our vertical-led repeatable solutions to create your own niche within one or more of these key verticals.

Comment below or schedule a consultation with our team and let's discuss how Tech Data can help you in building out an analytics or IoT practice. If you are interested in becoming a Tech Data channel partner, submit a reseller application or a vendor application.